Stelios Faitakis
Greek, b. 1976
One of the pioneering street artists in Greece in the 1990s, Stelios Faitakis depicts contemporary figures in the tradition of the Cretan School of Byzantine painting. Faitakis combines street art with religious symbols from Greek Orthodoxy; in Double Portrait (Red and Black) (2020) he adopts the Byzantine style of painting with ornately designed halos around figures dressed in contemporary clothes and using phones and laptops. The artist painted a mural for the Wynwood Walls in Miami that shared his thoughts on the breakdown of American society. Taking inspiration from artistic traditions such as Japanese Art and Mexican Muralism, Faitakis aims to explore human desire to question the nature of human existence through religion, history, and philosophy. He graduated from the Athens School of Fine Arts. His work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale and the Kiev Biennale.
